Alex Ross Perry – the filmmaker who directed the Pavement musical Slanted! Enchanted!, which opened in New York earlier this month – has revealed that the production is part of a larger film project about the band.
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Perry’s plans were discussed in a recent New Yorker profile, in which it’s explained that Pavement’s label, Matador Records, reached out to Perry about a film collaboration three years ago. The unorthodox project will combine elements of biopic, tour documentary, footage from the musical and its creation, and more.
According to the New Yorker profile, the project is based on a somewhat confusing directive from Pavement bandleader Stephen Malkmus. While the band wanted a movie, Malkmus didn’t want to hire a documentarian – he wanted to hire a screenwriter, but did not want a screenplay. “No one knew what that meant,” Perry told the New Yorker’s Hanah Seidlitz.
Perry – who also directed Pavement’s new video for 1999 song “Harness Your Hopes”, which was released earlier this year – began working on something “legitimate, ridiculous, real, fake, idiotic, cliché, illogical”. He used the comparison of several films made about Bob Dylan.
“You take the Todd Haynes’ Bob Dylan movie, the Scorsese documentary, the Pennebaker documentary, and the movie Dylan himself directed that everyone hates [Renaldo And Clara], and put them all in a blender,” he said. There is no word yet on a release date for the film.
“Malkmus is neck and neck with [Stephen] Sondheim in terms of his narrative storytelling, his sense of allusion and wordplay,” Perry later said while discussing the musical itself, which shares a similar title to the band’s 1992 debut album Slanted And Enchanted.
After a decade-long hiatus, Pavement announced their comeback in 2019 and finally reunited onstage earlier this year, with their first show since 2010 taking place in May. They’ve since completed North American, UK/Ireland and European tours, with more shows booked for Japan, Australia and New Zealand next year.